HP Recipe for OpenStack: Just Add Eucalyptus

HP has been launching initiatives into the OpenStack ecosystem in a big way over the last year with the biggest announcement coming in the spring during at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. As HP debuted their Helion OpenStack offering, they showed that they are going all-in on OpenStack for core products (HP Public Cloud) and to the customer on-premises with the Helion product.

Helion differed from other iterations of the open cloud toolkit by offering customer indemnity from legal activity which has been simmering in the background around Linux for some time.

Marten Mickos to Take Leadership Role

As a part of the acquisition, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos will lead up the HP cloud division as SVP and General Manager. Marten brings his experience from Eucalyptus and MySQL to the table which show the strength in managing open source companies.

Management changes in conjunction with product integration can be a challenge, so this in itself will be an interesting part of the challenge. HP has taken on some big projects and this is most likely a sign of more that may be coming down the pipe.

Co-opetition of Eucalyptus and OpenStack?

While OpenStack is a something that HP has clearly backed, the addition of Eucalyptus is not a simple puzzle piece to fit into the open cloud plans. Eucalyptus is effectively a competing product to OpenStack today which leads us to think that they will either work towards a two-pronged attack in their cloud offerings, or they may look to pull together the products into another more streamlined offering.

Only time will tell us what the integration of Eucalyptus into the HP cloud business will look like. At this point, the financial details of the acquisition have not been released. Given the lack of detailed financial information on the deal it will be particularly challenging to look from the outside to evaluate where HP will be able to win back their value on the Eucalyptus integration.

Between OpenStack, Eucalyptus, and Cloud Foundry, it seems that HP is stacking the deck in their favor. It will be very interesting to see other moves that this may trigger, or that are already in the works, from competitors such as EMC, VMware, Cisco, and IBM among others. Each of these organizations has made their mark already on the cloud landscape with relative surety that this is just the beginning of big growth in this sector.

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